As I’ve already commented today…. there has been a massive trackback spam swarm going on the last 24 hours. I’ve now racked up 1300 or so in the Akismet filter on this site and another 150 or so on another two sites. Akismet has been very impressive in defending this attack. Only 1% of the trackbacks slipped through, or about 14 or so across three sites. I’ve looked to see what other measures I can take against trackback spam and found one that looks like it should eliminate the 1% that got through.
Category: General Site Info
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Another trackback spam storm overnight….
All of the the swarms of trackback spam seemed to last an hour give or take a few minutes, so it does look kind of like “rent-a-bot” activity, lots of different IP addresses, trackback spam sites seem to have a common theme – the last batch was insurance type sites…. a sampling of about three or four found that they were all cloaked redirects for the same site/page …. http://www.finance-portal-online.com/insurance.php ALL are registered with moniker.com and all the insurance related domains being spammed (that I checked) redirect to the finance-portal-online.com site above which is registered to a “Bill Bilton” whose email is given as bill at top-support.net ….
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Speaking of botnets….
I seem to be getting the second flood of trackback spam attempts on the day. LOT’s of ip addresses, from all corners of the globe – most seem to be casino-related trackback spam. I guess botnets are being used for comment spam? It sure looks like a “100 pcs for an hour to do your bidding” kind of thing going on… There have been literally hundreds today alone (which is the first time I’ve actually seen this heavy a spam-storm. By the way…. I haven’t yet seen one slip into the actual comments… I attribute that almost entirely to a very useful WordPress 2.x plugin…
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Wow, impressive comment spam storm
But perhaps you are not as powerful as the emporer has foreseen…. I just skimmed the stats and saw an abornmal spike in traffic over the last hour, so being curious…. I checked the server logs and saw trackback post after trackback post, all different Internet Explorer versions. It doesn’t seem to be the same ip address repeating, but several. (Could it be a bot net?) Anyway, not much time here to investigate on that. Fortunately though, the trackback spam defending jedi akismet has been holding it’s own quite well with the onslaught. This is frankly the biggest trackback spam storm I’ve seen EVER which makes me curious as to why I came up on the radar…
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The Google Problem Part 2
If you know me…. you know I have a HARD time putting down a problem that’s unsolved. Even if it’s a problem that really doesn’t have a solution (in my control at least)… I have a tendency to look and analyze, turn it over and try and find out as much as I can about it. Maybe it’s because I’m so used to being able to find solutions to problems, or at least workarounds by gathering enough information… Anyway, after saying I was tired of trying to figure out why google doesn’t like a site and tired of trying to fix things “for google”….. well, I’ve spent more time “investigating”… or should I say “wasted” more time… I’m not sure which, but I did discover a couple interesting things.
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The Google Problem, or why I’m starting to use MSN and Yahoo more.
This weekend has been a bit of an introspective for me on why google is still the primary search engine I use. I know, I’ve been a big “fan(?)” of google for quite some time, I’ve obviously incorporated many of their products into my pages and used Google for 99% of my web searching. In recent months though, I’ve certainly had frustrations from the “site owner” side of the Google relationship. My North Carolina Genealogy site had traditionally been hosted as a subdirectory of averyjparker.com and had always enjoyed the lions share of traffic, so when I gave it it’s own domain, I did a 404 page not found for those following outdated links and I added an automatic 5 second redirect to the northcarolinagenealogy.net page. I soon learned that was a mistake, as the site vanished from Google around the first of December.
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More Google weirdness – Google results in flux again?
I was just skimming a couple articles after noticing two sites that I had reported to google as having WRONG cache information had disappeared. It looks as though there is a certain amount of flux going on in the Google results (more than I would expect just a usual churn.) For instance, this site has 70 pages available from one datacenter and over 1000 pages if I search at another datacenter.
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Cleaning out a few draft posts….
I really like a lot of features about WordPress. One is the ability to start a draft post and hang on to it indefinitely. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve spent a good part of the afternoon cleaning out a batch of some of the many draft posts I’ve accumulated over the last few weeks. (Along with some items that are fresh in the last day or two.) What I like about it is an opportunity to do a quick link in a post with a title and be able to retrieve that from any web-accessible computer to follow up on. It acts as a neat reminder or post-it note system as well.
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WordPress trackback problem FINALLY SOLVED….
For around 3-4 months now I’ve had a REALLY annoying problem with the wordpress install on this site. Trackbacks suddenly stopped working. Somewhere around my 800th post or so while the WMF vulnerability was circulating (between Christmas and New Years) and I was typing furiously – poof…. suddenly trackbacks stopped going out. (Incoming trackbacks seemed to work just fine…) What’s had me stumped for so long is that I host 2 (now three) other sites off the same domain and I haven’t had a problem with ANY of those sending pingbacks or trackbacks.
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OK – just fresh off the 5 wordpress install updates and now clamav…
So, I spent the better part of the evening doing WordPress updates to get 5 blogs up to v. 2.0.2 and now….. clamav has multiple vulnerabilities …………… oi…. now it’s time to rebuild clamav to install on 2 machines……